KAuthor

Karl Rábago is the
Executive director of
the Pace Energy and
Climate Center, at
the Pace Law School
in New York. He has
more than 20 years of
experience as a public
utility commissioner,
a federal executive at
the U. S. Department of
Energy, a utility executive, a researcher, an
advocate and a member
of the RMI team.

Tim Echols was
elected statewide to the
Georgia Public Service
Commission in 2010
and is up for re-election
in 2016. He owns 3
electric cars, preaches
energy effciency,
and installed solar
thermal on his home.

For and AgainstGive and Take About the Clean Power Planby Karl Rábago, Pace Energy and Climate Center, and Tim Echols, Georgia Public Service Commission

I teach energy law at the Pace
Law School in White Plains,
New York. We have a strong
environmental and energy
reputation, especially due to our
Pace Energy and Climate Center,
which I now have the privilege
to lead. This is not my first tour
at Pace. In 1990, while teaching
law at the U.S. Military Academy
at West Point, I attended Pace at
night to earn a post-doctorate
degree in environmental law.

That’s when I got the electricity
regulatory bug that has defined my career for the past 25 years.

Some other things happened over those 25 years

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration:
Comparing April 1988 to April 2015 ( 27 years), natural gas
consumption in the power sector more than tripled, renewable
energy consumption more than doubled, nuclear energy
consumption increased 47 percent, and coal consumption
decreased 17 percent. Electricity generation has become less
energy and carbon intensive over time. Compared to April
1998, April 2015 generation in the electric power sector was
44 percent higher, but the associated primary energy use and
carbon dioxide emissions increased by only 33 percent and 4
percent, respectively.

Annual carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants in
the U.S. are now about the same as they were in 1990. But
importantly, they have been declining steadily since 2005,
making up for steady growth from 1990 to 2005.

That is the prologue to this moment, and that is the
prologue to the final adoption of the Clean Power Plan
under § 111(d) of the Clean Air Act. It has been a full eight
years after the U.S. Supreme Court, in Massachusetts v.
EPA, held that the U.S. EPA has the authority and the
responsibility to regulate carbon dioxide emissions upon
an endangerment finding relating to this air pollutant.
This is where we find ourselves six years after the EPA
made that finding, and three years since the U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld
that finding.

I wonder what I will be teaching about the Clean PowerPlan five, 10 or even more years into our common future.

By 2025, I hope we can say that the Clean Power Plan
added to the critical momentum in the decline in carbon
dioxide emissions in the electricity sector that had finally
begun in 2005. Building off successes at the state level such
as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the Clean
Power Plan will drive emissions reductions at an even greater
pace in the decade after 2015 than in the decade before, in
spite of futile obstructionism that was finally overcome by
recently imposed Federal Implementation Plans.

The momentum will grow because the rules reflect
and reinforce the markets’ clear and consistent message that
coal-based electric generation has long been dying a death
of economic causes because cleaner energy technologies
continue to decline in cost and because customers continue to
improve the efficiency of their electricity use. What has been
judged in 2015 to be relatively modest regulations on carbon
emissions establishes the framework for driving even deeper
reductions, provides certainty to clean energy investors, and
serves to counteract reactionary regulatory maneuvers in
public utility commission proceedings.

The U.S. EPA rules will be upheld as a reasonable exercise
of agency authority against a stubborn and angry assault by
those that have profited by dumping their carbon dioxide
pollution into the atmosphere without accountability for so
long. The future may hold that the new president elected in 2016
will uphold the rules. They will be implemented in creative
ways that unleash a wave of clean energy innovation across
the country. Based on the RGGI model, coalitions of states
will establish and link market-based cap and trade systems, and
drive emission reductions even further than expected. States
that led the way and submitted thoughtful implementation plans
will be rewarded for early action and prosper from affordable,
reliable electricity, and from allowance sales. Sadly, customers
in the holdout states will pay a price.

The rules may end up costing far less than expected
overall; indeed, a healthy debate is ongoing about whether
the rules ultimately have any incremental cost at all. They
can also yield hoped-for returns in international global
climate negotiations shortly after adoption, as the U.S., a
leading global emitter of the pollutants that cause climate
change, takes real action to assume responsibility for their
share of the global problem.